Have you ever wondered what it would be like to look out the
window of a spacecraft and watch Mars move slowly by as you orbited
at over 3 km per second (almost 2 miles/second)? Select a version
of the Mars Y2K "movie" above that is compatible with your
browser, sit back, and watch...

This special Y2K movie was acquired by the color wide angle cameras of
the Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC), looking obliquely to the west as the
Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) spacecraft moved north past the rapidly
shrinking south polar cap of the red planet. The MOC began taking the
picture at 5:56:57 UTC on January 1, 2000, and continued imaging for
just under 13 minutes. While the image was being taken, clocks back on Earth
struck 12 Midnight, January 1, 2000, in the time zone
that includes Mexico City and Chicago, Illinois.

The "movie" shows the motion of the MGS spacecraft above the martian
surface at 15 times the speed it would pass under you if you were
really there---or if we had the bandwidth to give you the movie at its
full speed and resolution 8^). The bright white/pink surfaces are the
martian south polar cap. It was early summer on January 1, 2000, and
the martian atmosphere is hazy and pink with dust kicked up by the
many small- and medium-sized dust storms that have occurred along the
margin of the retreating seasonal frost cap.

The "movie" was taken as a test of using the realtime data link
between the MOC and Malin Space Science Systems (MSSS) to create
"live video" from Mars. During this realtime period, the MOC acquired
the images one line at a time, 13 lines per second and sent groups of
a few hundred lines at a time to Earth at 29,260 bits per second. Between
MOC and MSSS, the data moved first through the MGS payload data system and
then to the MGS radio for transmission to Earth. On Earth, a 34 m (110 foot)
diameter Deep Space Network (DSN) antenna in Canberra, Australia received
the data, and transferred them to and through the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's
Tracking and Mission Operations Directorate (TMOD) facilities to a
computer dedicated to serving realtime data. A "realtime" request
(or query) for data from the science operations and planing computer at
MSSS to this "master query server" brought the data to San Diego,
California. Once there, calibration programs corrected the brightness
and created the color composite from the red and blue images. Commercial
software on a Macintosh computer was used to create the movie.

Images credit: NASA/JPL/Malin Space Science Systems

Malin Space Science Systems and the California Institute of Technology
built the MOC using spare hardware from the Mars Observer mission. MSSS
operates the camera from its facilities in San Diego, CA. The Jet Propulsion
Laboratory's Mars Surveyor Operations Project operates the Mars Global Surveyor
spacecraft with its industrial partner, Lockheed Martin Astronautics, from
facilities in Pasadena, CA and Denver, CO.